Note from a Tajik Hospital - An overly personal look at global health, part II
A list of things that are very different from American hospitals:
1. The patient has to supply their own food. Family members generally bring it to the patient. They carry in bread, rice pilaf, fruit, juice - everything you can think of. There is a kitchen on each floor where food can be heated up. The little stores around the hospital cater to those needs - they have stuff like instant noodles and slippers for sale.
2. The patient has to supply their own linens. The hospital has some near-rags that they will put on the mattress if it's an emergency and the patient comes in with nothing, but they don't cover the entire thing and they're stained. My dad was in the ICU for the first night, where we couldn't even see him, and even as special American VIPs we were asked to bring linens to the door of the unit for his bed.
3. The equipment is sparser and older. The drainage tube from my father's incision ran into a Sprite bottle tied to the side of his bed. The beds themselves looked about twenty years old. There was a remarkable lack of anything that beeped in the post-op recovery room. There was one bedpan being shared by several rooms on dad's floor. When we needed it, I'd ask a nurse to hunt it down. More than once, patients came to my room looking for it.
4. Surgical skills are really impressive. My dad's surgery was performed quickly, and thoroughly. It's four days later and there is no swelling, bruising or infection. The doctor who diagnosed him did a truly masterful job of identifying appendicitis by palpitating his stomach and abdomen and simply watching his face for a pain response. My dad was operated on within an hour of arriving at the hospital.
In general, I was struck by the way that the system assumed extensive social/family support for the patients, and the way it was not at all set up for revenue recovery.
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